Forty-Six - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 101

started to swap positions with each other - by this stage I was
used to seemingly stationary objects floating about. Then I felt
an eerie tingle, like the shiver caused by the movement of an
unexplained shadow in the darkness.
Lifting my goggles, I was momentarily blinded by the
unfiltered light but as my eyes refocused on the three dark
lumps I knew exactly what they were. I stopped skiing, pulled
down my face mask, let my arms hang by my sides and waited
for them to get closer. I knew they had seen me - I would have
been visible from miles away. Sure enough as I watched they
converged like heat-seeking missiles, great plumes of snow
hanging in the air behind them as they bounced and plunged
and ploughed through the sastrugi. In less than a minute the
three oversized trucks with their half deflated wheels that I
knew to be forty-four inches in diameter had stopped within
metres of me. They were the very same vehicles I had driven to
the Pole just the year before.
Twelve months after skiing to the South Pole with a team of
women from around the Commonwealth I'd been asked to go
back as support crew looking after a joint German-Austrian
TV production. I was part of a three-person team that would
drive modified 4x4 trucks from the coast of Antarctica to the
Pole and back to transport and support two film crews. The
other members of my team were Icelanders, Gisli and Gummi.
The unfamiliar Icelandic names had made them sound, to me,
like two of Snow White's seven dwarves. The impression was
deepened when we all met for the first time; they were both
bearded and ruddy. Over the following six weeks, and 6,000
kilometres, I learnt to trust my new team completely and we
became good friends - friends that now appeared from the
vehicles in front of me.